I remember at the time being frustrated that, after in person interviewing, they left me hanging for four months. I had a NSF grant that had been approved and if Google X had offered me a role I would have turned down the grant, but after months of silence I had to tell Google that I needed an answer or the decision would be made for me.
It was incredibly inconsiderate, the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.
>> the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.
I had two friends within the span of 18 months have this experience where they've run the gauntlet of pre-screening, get invited out to Google offices. Run through two days of grueling interviews, all the while getting a lot of great positive feedback about their performance. They end the last day, go back to the hotel, thinking about leaving the following morning.
They get a call around dinner time. "Hey, we had two more directors that wanted to speak to you tomorrow, it would only be for a few hours, but they were really impressed with the feedback and wanted to have some more time with you. Can you stay for one more day?"
Both later found out this is a complete ruse to find out how bad you want to work at Google. This forces you to change your flight plans, pay for the change to your ticket, pay for another night at a hotel, etc. If you do, they line something up that's super casual. If you reject the offer and return home, they conclude you didn't want to work their bad enough to change all of your plans and remove you from the candidate pool.
Same thing, once you turn them down and maintain your plans of leaving the next morning, they just ghost you and you never hear back from them. The irony was one of the two was contacted a year later from a different department asking him if he would be interested in interviewing for another position there. He said he rolled his eyes and politely declined the offer. He said it was pretty unreal to treat him like garbage and then come back and see if he was interested in another role there. As if everything there is so disconnected or they thought this was just completely acceptable behavior.
This doesn't pass the sniff test.
Why would the candidate be on the hook for the flight change and extra night at a hotel?
When I interviewed with Google ~10 years ago, they booked and paid for my my flights (from China to the US), hotel and car hire. I didn't have to book, pay and then ask for reimbursement, let alone foot the bill myself.
The 'two days' sounds weird to me as well. In my experience (on both sides of the table) face to face interviews were scheduled to be on a single day.
Perhaps things have changed or your friends were interviewing for very specialist roles?